


Birthright

by NKMLN



Category: Dice Will Roll (Podcast)
Genre: Birds, Blood, Body Horror, Drowning, Gen, Nightmares, Pathfinder - Freeform, eriato honey i am so sorry, give eriato a better mom 2k20, god I hope I spelled Royari's name right, pathfinder hags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:33:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26130448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NKMLN/pseuds/NKMLN
Summary: Night hags use dreams to ensnare their victims, and to slowly feed on and use their desperation and fear for their own purposes. Their changeling children are not exempt from the family business.
Relationships: eriato & volio & royari





	Birthright

**Author's Note:**

> The official Pathfinder site says that the Call usually manifests as an urge to wander. I say thats bullshit. Please heed the tags.

Eriato dreams of a valley.

The pressure here makes her ears pop, and she stays on her back among the rippling wheat. The sky above blazes with storm clouds, swollen with rain, and she feels herself sinking into the mud. She cannot move. Her eyes roll wildly in their sockets, but she cannot twitch a finger, swivel a single joint as the dirt pulls her in. Her mouth is dry. Her ears ring. She tries to open her mouth to cry for help-

-

“Eri.” A hand on her shoulder. “Eriato. Wake up, love.”

She bolts awake and reaches, shivering, for Royari, who hugs her through her thin sheets. She can’t breathe. Small, choked noises tear from her throat, and Royari shushes her quietly, like she’s a small child. “Hey. There we go. There we go, you’re okay.”

Volio stirs in his bunk, but he stays asleep. She clutches Royari, unable to speak. She’s had nightmares before, of course, but this is different. This makes her skin tighten, her teeth ache. This hurts, and she has to take several deep breaths before she returns to her own body.

Royari sits next to her, lets her lean on his shoulder. “Do you want to talk?”

She shakes her head. Speech is not one of her capabilities right now. They seem to understand. They sit with her in the darkness for a long while. She’s okay. She’s okay. “Nightmare,” she finally murmurs. “Just- bad dream.”

Royari is quiet for a moment longer. “I’m sorry, dear,” she says quietly, “but that’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

“Wh-”

Something cold is pushed into her hands, and something is wrapped around her throat, and her vision goes white.

-

She opens her eyes to an endless ocean.

There is no sun. The sky is a glaring white. Something touches her leg, and she tries to scream, but her mouth only takes in water as it pulls her down, down, down.

The seawater stings her eyes, and she holds her breath for an eternity until she is left to conclude that she will not drown here. The thing around her leg is gone, if it was ever there in the first place, but still the water takes her into its embrace until the light disappears and it becomes just her and this all-encompassing dark.

She is bleeding, she thinks. There is something wrong with her skin. She tears at it, sloughing, burning in the water, and it gives under her fingers, peeling back from her muscles like wet paper off metal. The water sighs. The salt presses into her wounds. She tries to scream, but the water pours through her flayed form into her lungs, and her chest fires in new agony.

-

Someone is holding her. She doesn’t think it’s Royari anymore.

“Deep breaths,” the woman tells her. She trembles at her touch, cold and pure and bright. Her blood spatters and pools around their feet on the floor. “You’re doing so well, Eriato.”

-

Ravens. Eyes. Stone.

She is sprawled and tethered under an empty sky, if, indeed, there is a sky. This world is charcoal gray, cut only by the wings of the birds that flock to her. Their talons dig past what remains of her flesh, cut against her bone, and she shrieks in agony, but they take no heed as they pull her structure past the outer limits of her body. She is distended. She is distorted.

She is alive. The ravens seem intent on keeping her that way. There is no space for meaning in this place. She does not suspect it is a dream. She cannot suspect anything, anymore.

A bird lands on her face, and she squeezes her eyes shut as it scratches at her mouth, clawing and shredding without regard to her pain.

Her jaws crack, distend, and she tears it in half between her teeth.

-

Light. Grace. She heaves for breath as the woman holds her close, singing quietly. There are things worse than death, and she is balanced on the precipice.

Volio’s warmth. Royari’s voice. She’s safe here.

Neither of her friends have wings, but she can’t think to question it.

-

The tide pools around her feet. Her dress, which she cannot remember putting on, is crusted with salt and torn jaggedly at the hem. It sticks to her flayed body, stinging terribly. She almost can’t see herself in the polished stone mirror, her eyes so crusted together with blood and dirt.

“Beautiful,” someone murmurs to her, and she flinches. “Oh, sweet girl, look at you.”

She is looking. A set of long, skeletal hands comb through her hair.

“You’ve gotten so big,” the voice croons, and it’s as if the idea of it is being chiseled out behind her eyes. Beauty. Yes. This could be beautiful. She could be beautiful like this.

She is something less than, more than. Something not quite, something too much. She is stripped, and there is power in her, now, in jagged claws and torn muscle and gaping, shining viscera. She is perfect. She is loved.

This thing loves her. It is forcing her to love it back.

Something alights on her skin. Its small wings brush gently against her. Its feet are coated in blood and still, still, she hears its voice.

This is swollen, putrid, rot and nightmares and deep, still water. This is no love she wants a part of.

This is not her family.

The cavern crumbles, the sky and its song pouring in, the darkness so thick with stars that to form a map of them would be trying to chart the grains of sand on a beach, her form engulfed in flames, and she breathes, and she breathes, and she breathes.

-

Royari is already lying next to her when she properly wakes. Volio watches her carefully from the floor, and Oddbody curls over her knees, trilling quietly. They engulf her as soon as her eyes are open.

She stiffens for a moment, but there is skin over her frame again, and she has settled, and so she hugs them back and lets the nightmare go.


End file.
